Year: 2006

A few random links that I’ve collected. How to be an 31337 hax04 and send mail to a DL to which you don’t have rights. Suggestions on what to do if you have only one day to visit Seattle. Original anchor article by the Seattle Times staff. Broken down by category. Reader feedback. More feedback….

Some years ago, a group different from the one I worked in invited me to “volunteer” to help them with serious problems they were having with their product. They asked to “borrow” me for one week so that I could magically resolve all their issues. I wasn’t really that familiar with their product, and I…

The Seattle Times reports that the National Weather Service is inviting suggestions from the public on what to call the recent windstorm. They’re baffled because “the storm didn’t fall on a holiday.” Huh? The storm blew in on the evening of the 14th, but its effects weren’t really felt until the morning of the 15th,…

The documentation for the VerQueryValue function states that the first parameter is a “pointer to the buffer containing the version-information resource returned by the GetFileVersionInfo function.” Some people, however, decide to bypass this step and pass a pointer to data that was obtained some other way, and then wonder why VerQueryValue doesn’t work. The documentation…

We interrupt this religious holiday for an important commercial announcement. As a special Christmas present, my new best friends at Addison-Wesley sent me an advance copy of the dead-tree edition of my book. (Obligatory plug: Order it from Amazon. You know I want you to.) One commenter asked whether my book would be available electronically….

Last time we looked at the format of 32-bit version resources, but I ended with the remark that what you saw purported to be the resources of shell32.dll but actually weren’t. What’s going on here? The resources I presented last time were what the resources of shell32.dll should have been, but in fact they aren’t….

Slate’s Explainer column answers questions about current events. Sometimes they do it multiple times, as they did when I asked them how to pronounce the name Pinochet and they said Pee-no-CHAY, then later corrected themselves with pin-oh-CHET, and then again re-corrected themselves with Yes. Yesterday, the Explainer provided a selection of the questions they received…

Last time we looked at the format of 16-bit version resources. The 32-bit version is nearly identical, except that everything is now in Unicode. Each node is stored in the following structure (in pseudo-C): struct VERSIONNODE { WORD cbNode; WORD cbData; WORD wType; WCHAR wszName[]; BYTE rgbPadding1[]; // DWORD alignment union { BYTE rgbData[cbData]; WCHAR…